It is a common business practice for suppliers of services and products to create a business relationship with corporations such that the supplier caters to employees of the corporations by providing special customized offerings to the employees. For example, in the area of financial services, the employees are offered special deals in banking, credit cards, home equity, insurance and investments. Depending on the size of the corporation and other factors, the corporation negotiates with the supplier to provide different offerings and pricing with respect to these products and services. The contracts with the corporations may, for example, include deferred fees or lower minimum balances, or certain amount of money back on a home equity deal.
Historically, these offerings began as paper-based information for the employees, evolved to providing information via CD-ROMS, further evolved to providing the information on the corporation's intranets, and then to a static website accessed on the Internet.
A next step in the evolution of these offerings is a portal product that is capable of providing customized websites for each corporation. Unfortunately, the prior art portal environments suffer from several drawbacks that limit their usefulness. Specifically, these portal environments provide unsatisfactory methods of importing information from external sites and presenting a cohesive customer experience.
Some options to solve this problem that have been rejected by the present inventors include: creating a normalized data store between the external sites that would allow for a middleware layer to access appropriate content and applications; frame the external content; or “pop up” the external content in a new browser window. Each of these options were deemed unattractive for a variety of reasons. The normalized data store is a huge project that would consume many resources over a long period. The second and third options result in a poor user experience.
One prior art portal creation tool is known as Epicentric by Vignette Inc. One of the limitations of the prior art portal creation tools such as Epicentric is that they only allow one chrome to be defined per page. The chrome is that part of the application window that lies outside of a window's content area. Toolbars, menu bars, progress bars, and window title bars are all examples of elements that are typically part of the chrome. Given the prior art's concept of a page, one is limited to having a single look-and-feel wrap around each of the modules on that page. This considerably limits one's creativity in designing a site. Also, this limitation prevents developers from designing a website site according to the selected composite.
Additional problems with the prior art include unsatisfactory clipping methodology, insufficient scrubbing capability and the inability to control embedded links in content retrieved from external sources.